“The future of the Earth is to die with the sun boiling up the oceans” say astronomers
Thu, Sep 13, 2007
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Astronomers have discovered the first known planet to survive the “red-giant” phase – a process whereby aging stars expand and engulf its orbiting bodies. The discovery of the “gas-giant planet” three times the size of Jupiter, shows an insight into the future of our own solar system. What will happen to the Earth when the sun grows old and collapses?
The planet is some 4,500 light-years from Earth. It once orbited its star at the same distance as the Earth is now from the sun about eight light-minutes, but then subsequently drifted away.
Scientists have identified around 250 planets orbiting stars other than our sun. Most are detected by indirect measurements such as tiny variations in the “wobble” of a star.
The team found that during its time as a middle-aged star, V 391 Pegasi had a mass similar to the sun before it expanded its radius by more than 100 times when it swelled into a red-giant – something the sun is expected to do in 5 billion years.
The researchers said the planet stayed intact because the parent star lost mass, reducing its gravitational pull just enough to let the planet drift away a bit.
Scientists claim that our very own star – the Sun is around 30 percent bigger already than when it first came into being. As it gradually exhausts all its hydrogen, the star’s dimensions will continue to swell.
Astronomers predict that the processes happening on V 391 Pegasi will be replicated by the Earth in 5 billion years time. The actual “earth” ironically may survive.
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What will happen to the earth in 5 billion years | felix ker’s blog Says:
September 14th, 2007 at 5:09 pm[...] http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/?p=283 earth, future Posted by Felix Ker in Interesting Articles Share This [...]
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What will happen to the earth in 5 billion years « Space News Says:
October 1st, 2007 at 2:21 pm[...] read more | digg story [...]
September 13th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
But it doesn’t matter right? Because after the sun expands, it will shrink really small, I think. And then it will get verrrry cold. But by then hopefully we will be living in other solar systems (if not galaxies). And earth will be a relic to point out in telescopes.
September 13th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
We’ll all be dead anyway!
September 14th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Whew! At first I thought it said 5 *million* years…
September 14th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
I guess that’s not so bad, but we’ll still all be dead.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:16 am
actually i just saw on TV that in 2 BILLION years the Earth will die! So…um..don’t believe this site or those astrounauts. The TV show was The Way Earth Was Made, or something like that!! So in 2 billion years your all dead and so am I. And we’re all in a gap of an ice age to!
December 31st, 2007 at 4:17 am
And also the dinosaurs died of a meteriod!
December 31st, 2007 at 4:20 am
Well your in the middle of that gap if you live in North America. AHHHHH!!Hey…..at least 2 billion years is a long,long,longgggggggggggggg so longtime from now!!!!!!!
July 11th, 2008 at 12:54 am
NOTHING WILL HAPPEN TO THIS EARTH, BUT ONLY ALL LIFE UNDERWATER AND ON EARTH ARE AT RISK OF DEATH. THEIR IDEA IS TO COVER THE CONTINENTS WITH AS MUCH SALTWATER AS POSSIBLE, BUT I KNOW HOW TO STOP IT == http://www.socyberty.com/Activism/First-Step-for-the-Solution-to-Global-Warming.103109 THEIR INTENTIONS WERE TO USE NATURE AGAINST ALL LIFE ON EARTH. BY MELTING THE GLACIERS THEY CREATE MOVEMENT FOR THEMSELVES UNDETECTED AND STARVE OUT THE LARGE MAMMALS. WE’RE HUNTING THEIR BEAMS NOW, THAT ARE WEAKENING THE OZONE, THEY DONT KNOW THEIR INCOMING TO INHABIT EARTH IS ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH A COMET. BUT IF YOU ASTRONOMERS WOULD HELP INSTEAD OF MAKING UP STORIES, IT WOULD HELP US ALL, SO THEIR IS’NT A PANIC. WE NEED TO EXTRACT THE SANDS OF TIME AND I’D GET A SALVAGE LICENSE SO THE TREASURES YOU FIND IN THE SAND CAN BE YOURS.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
ok i dont get how this answers what will happen in the future??? if global warming continues what will be the result??
April 29th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
I think that before this happens global warming will already effect the earth so humanity will already be extinct. besides none of us will be alive but it will be sad when we watch the earth be engulfed by the sun when we are in hell (maby) or heaven. =( =( =( =(
May 1st, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Wow…i never knew this…but i guess not everything lives forever.
But in 2 billion years?! you’re kidding! I wish…
May 21st, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Hi
Well there are many thories and many possibilities of what will happend in our futur. The Sun is expected to come into its BIG RED GIANT PHASE ; wich means it will extend from 200 to 1000 times of it’s current size. It is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of the solar system’s inner planets, up to Earth,and its radius will expand to a minimum of 200 times its current value. The Sun will lose a significant fraction of its mass in the process of becoming a red giant, and there is a chance that Mars and all the outer planets will escape as their resulting orbits will widen.Mercury and most likely Venus will have been swallowed by sun’s outer layer at this time. Earth’s fate is less clear. Earth could technically achieve a widening of its orbit and could potentially maintain a sufficiently high angular velocity to keep it from becoming engulfed. In order to do so, its orbit needs to increase to between 1.3 AU (190,000,000 km) and 1.7 AU (250,000,000 km).However the results of studies announced in 2008 show that due to tidal interaction between sun and Earth, Earth would actually fall back into a lower orbit, and get engulfed and incorporated inside the sun before the sun reaches its largest size, despite the sun losing about 38% of its mass.Before this happens, Earth’s biosphere will have long been destroyed by the Sun’s steady increase in brightness as its hydrogen supply dwindles and its core contracts, even before the transition to a Red Giant. After just over 1 billion years, the extra solar energy input will cause Earth’s oceans to evaporate and the hydrogen from the water to be lost permanently to space, with total loss of water by 3 billion years.[18] Earth’s atmosphere and lithosphere will become like that of Venus. Over another billion years, most of the atmosphere will get lost in space as well; ultimately leaving Earth as a desiccated, dead planet with a surface of molten rock.
Predicted events after year 1,000,000
***Please note that there are many different theories and models about our universe and its past, present and future behavior. Because of these factors, the events listed in this section should not be considered definitive, complete or necessarily consistent with one another.
8,400,000: LAGEOS 2 satellite time capsule re-enters Earth’s atmosphere.
600,000,000 to 3,500,000,000 (estimates vary): Slow but steady increase in solar luminosity will cause Earth’s oceans to evaporate, leaving it inhospitable to life.
1,000,000,000: The last total solar eclipse on Earth will occur, due to the Moon’s orbit gradually becoming larger and spreading away from the earth (see Tidal acceleration for more on this).
3,000,000,000: The Andromeda Galaxy and our Milky Way Galaxy are predicted to collide.
5,400,000,000: The Sun leaves the main sequence, becoming a red giant.
7,590,000,000: The red giant Sun engulfs the Earth.
7,816,000,000: The Sun becomes a white dwarf about the size of the Earth.
17,000,000,000: The Sun becomes a black dwarf.
30,000,000,000: Earliest possible date for the universe to collapse in the hypothetical scenario known as the Big Crunch.
100,000,000,000: The Virgo Supercluster merges into one super galaxy, millions of light-years across, filled with Red Dwarfs and small amounts of White Dwarfs. Other superclusters have also merged, yet have been separated from each other by distances of more than a billion light-years due to the acceleration of Dark Matter and Energy.
100,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion): The Big Freeze according to many cosmologists. Intelligent life existing then may flee to other universes, as suggested by the physicist Michio Kaku. Beginning of the Degenerate Era of our universe. End of normal star formation and normal stars in the Milky Way/M31 super-galaxy. New stars formed only via brown dwarf collisions every hundred billion years or so.
100,000,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quadrillion): The Universe ends in a Big Crunch according to Frank Tipler’s Omega Point Theory, but its inhabitants experience an infinite subjective lifetime.
10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 quintillion): The Galaxy relaxes gravitationally. Ninety percent of stars escape into intergalactic space while the rest merge with the central Black Hole.
1040: Beginning of the Black Hole Era of our universe, unless proton decay does not occur.
10100 (one googol): If the theory of black hole evaporation is correct, it is predicted by many astronomers that all the black holes in our universe will have evaporated by around this year, the beginning of the Dark Era of our universe, unless proton decay does not occur.
101500: Cold fusion occurring via quantum tunneling should make the light nuclei in ordinary matter fuse into iron-56 nuclei (see isotopes of iron.) Fission and alpha-particle emission should make heavy nuclei also decay to iron, leaving stellar-mass objects as cold spheres of iron.
: Quantum tunneling may make iron stars collapse into neutron stars.
One theory holds that the universe will stop expanding and start to contract, ultimately disappearing in the Big Crunch, the event where the universe collapses back to singularity. Others postulate that the universe may experience the Big Rip, where the expansion of the universe becomes so powerful that even the spacetime breaks apart. A third theory anticipates that the universe will continue expanding indefinitely at an ever-increasing pace, with the universe eventually approaching heat death.